While I have no doubt the cases he cites are real, I wonder whether we’ll see broad adoption that delivers breakthrough value in the way Andy describes. Many organizations are deeply rooted in Taylorian time and motion thinking that brings the kind of hierarchical order with which many are comfortable. That has led to much discussion around infusing E2.0 into resistant business cultures.
via blogs.zdnet.com
Dennis Howlett reviews Andrew McAfee's new book and struggles with the thought that Enterprise 2.0/social media will EVER fit into some organisations, where McAfee is optimistic that it can (and presumably should).
Like McAfee, I am optimistic, and believe that most, if not all organisations would benefit from a more "social" approach to business. I am also realist enough to believe that there will always be some that are too fixed in their command-and-control hierarchies and power structures to allow that socialisation to happen. Where perhaps I differ from Dennis in that realism, is that I think that the resistance will cost those companies dearly in the long run, mainly in the areas of attraction and retention of talented employees, and the accelerated innovation possible when you open up to business partners.
I'm conscious, though, that there is no one "right" way to run a business – for every business model known to man (and a few beyond that) you can find successes and failures. In the end I think it comes down to something that Alistair Cockburn said (he was discussing developers on a software project, but I think it can be generalised): that people are non-linear first-order variables in any project; i.e. the individuals involved in (for this discussion) the adoption of E2.0/social media in an organisation are key factors in its success or otherwise.
The short form of that? It's horses for courses …
Ric I like you hold hope that business leaders will one day figure this stuff out. In fact they need to figure this out, short story. 3 or 4 years ago I attended on of those management training courses run by the company I was working for. The objective in part was to support a cultural transformation project and in part to teach us what the organisations expectations were for us a managers.
Anyway one activity was a 5 hour “game” designed to demonstrate how individual teams work together. We were divided into small groups of 3-4 people and provided a series of cards that we needed to trade. The idea being you needed to collect a set of similar cards to earn points and the team with the most points won. The catch was in the end the other teams provided feedback on how each team performed looking at business acumen, trust, teamwork, would you do business with them again, you know typical behaviours organisations want to see demonstrated by their employees.
The activity started as you would expect lots of negotiations, deals being made, people were looking out for themselves so eventually there was double crossing, lying, cheating. I decided it was time to put some “cluetrain” into the event. We figured that the best way for everyone to win was to collaborate and share knowledge so I convinced the team to open source our cards. We opened everything up, complete transparency. We would trade with anyone on one condition they opened up and laid down all of their cards as well. Some teams did not like this approach so they continued the wheeling and dealing approach, others began to work with us.
At the end of the day while our team did not have the most card sets, we were second or third out of 12 teams, we triumphed in the feedback section. Our openness and transparency gave us top marks from our peers pushing us not only into the front but we achieved a score the facilitators had never had in the 5 years they had been running the event!
By taking completely open and honest approach we had achieved very well on the pure business side but once the feedback was included we essentially won.
I firmly believe that bringing the ideas and concepts of the social web/cluetrain/whatever you want to call it into organisations are essential for their long term survival.
Well … hopefully the “self-served” interests aren’t quite so overwhelming, and maybe we’re a bit smarter than that – we can always hope! But a good point; it’s certainly not going to be easy to accomplish, and emphasises my point that the individuals involved are the key to success …
Thanks for the riff. I didn’t say this on the blog but it occurred to me that if self serving interests prevented world leaders from coming to any agreement in Copenhagen then what hope for social business?